In December, a group of outside scholars appointed by a Harvard board was roundly criticized for describing the plagiarism that ultimately contributed to former President Claudine Gay’s resignation as “duplicative language.” This description was seen by many as an effort to minimize Gay’s transgression. And it was. But I think the board was on to something useful nevertheless. The term “plagiarism” is overstretched.
Ironically, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who worked so hard to push Claudine Gay out of her job, would now seem to agree. In a twist so uncanny you couldn’t have written it any better, Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a former M.I.T. professor, appears to have lifted chunks of her dissertation from other sources, including Wikipedia.
In the blink of an eye after these revelations, Ackman acquired an exquisite sensitivity to the difference between real plagiarism and the other, accidental-word-copying kind. Yet the difference he suddenly understands is one that anyone can. To think that neither Gay nor Oxman “really” plagiarized, or to believe that the sanction for such errors should be less severe, is an entirely reasonable point of view.
But here in this world, in this language, the term “plagiarism” still covers both “real” plagiarism — the theft of another person’s ideas — and the use, perhaps inadvertent, of another person’s language. For that reason, I continue to think Gay was correct to step down — especially given that Harvard, like many universities, explicitly defines plagiarism for undergraduates in the “old” way. If accidental cutting and pasting could theoretically get a sophomore suspended, repeated instances of the same should lead an administrator to step down. Meanwhile, given his support for the attacks on Gay, Ackman’s defense of his wife is a hot mess: He should knock off the sputtering and just eat crow.
Leave it to a linguist to say this, but we need another word. In this case, we need a word for the relatively minor, “duplicative language” version of plagiarism.
To present someone else’s ideas as one’s own is unquestionably wrong, in academia and elsewhere. However, to cite boilerplate statements — the assumptions basic to a field, for instance — word for word, or close to it, without citing the person who typed the words originally is something different, and vastly less egregious. I would argue, in fact, that there may be nothing wrong with it at all, in particular when it is done accidentally.